Penn Ranked #5 in USNWR 2008

Colleges & Universities A-Z University of Pennsylvania
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<p>That’s what moms are supposed to do. And don’t think it stops when you get to be middle-aged or even older (if you’re lucky enough to still have your mom around). You’ll always be her little baby.</p>

<p>There aren’t too many big cities–in fact, NONE–you can go to that don’t have crime. And as we learned yet again this past spring, even idyllic rural campuses are not immune to horrible violence. Statistically, though, you’d be as safe at Penn as you would be at most places, and certainly as safe as you’d be at other big-city schools.</p>

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<p>"This may be hearsay but wasn’t the idea to make Penn an “open” campus, more integrated into the community, so that the school wouldn’t garner animosity from the townies for being a bastion of wealth and snobbery?
This idea hasn’t really worked out, has it? Wouldn’t Penn be a little better off as a more secure campus? "</p>

<p>This is totally wrong. The Penn campus has always been open to the community (aside from entrance to the dorms). The Penn Connects plan has nothing to do with getting the “townies” to love Penn (BTW, most Philadelphians would take offense at being called “townies” - they are city people). Penn is already the largest private employer in Phila and provides health care to the surrounding community and all sorts of social services. I don’t think there has ever been an antagonistic relationship with the “community” unless you count a few loudmouths who would complain no matter what Penn (or anyone else) did - these same people would be crying bloody murder if Penn picked up and left for the suburbs. The campus was not designed as, and could never be, a walled off fortress, nor does anyone want it to be that way even if they could. There are already lots of cameras, campus police, etc. They can’t be everywhere or prevent 100% of crime, but they do generally keep it to a “tolerable” level. What are your ideas for a “more secure campus”? What is Yale doing that Penn doesn’t?</p>

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<p>I’d like the campus to be walled-off.</p>

<p>I really don’t like being asked for money three times at 2 AM walking from Fro-gro to Rodin.</p>

<p>It happens often enough that I would not be surprised if eventually someone doesn’t ask so nicely and doesn’t leave me alone when I say “sorry”.</p>

<p>I come from a big city (albeit one with very little violent crime), so I can deal with bums and beggars. But on campus, I don’t see why we should have to put up with it.</p>

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<p>I lived in a sketch area of Los Angeles half my life, and now live in an absurdly affluent suburb…but when I go to downtown LA or around the USC area, I feel comfortable.
In fact, I compared the look and surroundings of USC to PENN when I visited.</p>

<p>Yale doesn’t have the center of campus open; the tall buildings basically block getting inside the school without needing a gate, and then entrances have these sliding doors and a guard in a booth; students have to sign-in visitors and use their ID to get in. Things like the big cafeteria and their crazy alabaster library are open to the street.
Yale had a nice residential interior. But I just got that “feeling”. Not the Penn “feeling” I got when eating crepes, the bad feeling. So I can’t apply to Yale. :)</p>

45

<p>I’m sorry, but some of these kids, who are obviously just entering college age, need to understand how to move and interact amongst residents in bigger cities and small college towns. Like you alluded to 45, remember V Tech? Remember Columbine? There is just a stereotype that surrounds most big cities and many of you precious little sheltered kids really need to gain more awareness about the world and what goes on it, regardless of location. Why is everyone talking about possible campus crime when it is obviously not so big a deterrent that people wouldn’t consider attending a great school such as UPenn? If people believe that there is such a grave danger in attending a school in a city such as Philly, go to U Wisc. - Madison or Penn State. When some crazy student there decides to shoot up the damn place, then maybe people will begin to understand that if something is going to happen, it is going to happen and it pays to try not to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. There are unwritten rules for all life, including college and walking around most places at 2 or 3 a.m. could be a recipe for disaster. I bet the parents of the V-Tech victims would consider a more urban school for their kids if they could do it over again.</p>

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<p>I remember during alumni weekend I saw a cop actually shoo off a homeless bum wandering around 36th & Walnut.</p>

<p>That gave me a warm fuzzy feeling inside. Shame they only do it during alumni weekend…</p>

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<p>"The University of Pennsylvania, one of the fastest rising research universities in the U.S. News rankings, is one institution that seems to have cracked the code. In 1994, Penn ranked 50th in the faculty-resources category. By 2002 it ranked first in that category, a position it has held ever since. Partly as a result, Penn’s overall rank rose from 16th in 1994 to as high as fourth, most recently in 2006. This year it ranks seventh.</p>

<p>The university’s strategy “includes the recruitment and retention of an ever-more-eminent faculty, reduced class size, increased financial aid, greater opportunities for undergraduates to engage in research, and optimizing opportunities for interdisciplinary work,” says a spokesman, Ron Ozio. “We will continue to pursue that strategy regardless of where we stand in any external rankings.”</p>

<p>A former Penn official said the institution was constantly evaluating its programs and how they were doing in the rankings.</p>

<p>“The effect of different policies on the rankings was constantly being taken into account,” says Colin S. Diver, dean of the law school at Penn from 1989 to 1999, and now president of Reed College. “My sense was, trustees who really cared about the rankings were particularly influential.”"</p>

<p>-Penn jumped 49 places in faculty resources in 8 years? Hrm, sounds suspicious. <a href=“http://chronicle.com/free/v53/i38/38a01101.htm[/url]”>http://chronicle.com/free/v53/i38/38a01101.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>"4. University of Pennsylvania </p>

<p>And now we’re on the other side of the looking glass. Penn is a very good research university, to be sure, one of the top 15 or so in the nation, on a par, more or less, with UCLA, Wisconsin, Texas, Cornell, etc. But how did it get ranked 4th for undergraduate education? It certainly has a better student-faculty ratio than state research universities like Wisconsin and Texas, but that’s not why it’s ranked 4th. It’s ranked 4th because they cook the numbers, plain and simple (as a former Penn Dean said to me a few years back, "I’d hate to be around if they ever audited the books"). That started with former Penn President Judith Rodin; whether Amy Gutmann will continue that “tradition” remains to be seen. **For a variety of reasons having to do with the ranking criteria, the undergraduate rankings are even more subject to manipulation through creative accounting and outright fraud than the law school rankings. **</p>

<p><a href="http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2004/08/the_latest_us_n.html"&gt;http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2004/08/the_latest_us_n.html&lt;/a&gt;"&lt;/p&gt;

48

<p>“Penn is a very good research university, to be sure, one of the top 15 or so in the nation, on a par, more or less, with UCLA, Wisconsin, Texas, … etc.”</p>

<p>Oh, puhlease, Penn doesn’t belong in the same breath as these mid level state U’s. Whoever wrote this is full of crap - maybe Penn manipulates the numbers but this guy is totally biased in the other direction. If he had said " Michigan, Berkeley, UVA" he would have at least had some shred of credibility but by likening Penn to decent but not top level state U’s he reveals his bias. Maybe he had Penn confused with Penn State?</p>

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<p>I feel so cheated…when will this horror stop?</p>

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<p>I find this thread quite interesting. The Penn bashing people do on CC is most definitely driven by sour grapes and individuals holding on to the past. I rarely see posts from HYPSM fans bashing Penn. The loudest protesters seem to come from Columbia fans (especially truazn8948532 LOL). Penn students rarely seem to bash other schools with the same animostity. Sour grapes indeed.</p>

<p>Anyway, one key point: alot of people say Penn is nothing w/o Wharton. Wharton undergrad represents about 15% of the student population; the College of Arts and Sciences is another 60%. Moreso, Wharton’s endowment is about $700 mm, compared to Penn’s endowment of over $6.3 billion. In short, Wharton is a world class part, but still a small component, of a great school. Wharton brings in a fraction of Penn’s research funding and provides a small share of social/civic services and community outreach. Penn’s ranking is due to many other factors besides the school of business.</p>

<p>Penn’s momentum is from (as another poster mentioned) visionary leaders (president, deans, etc.), aggressively securing research grants, making heavy investments in targeted areas and reinforcing it’s other world class capabilities - its health care schools, communication school, bioengineering, etc. And most importantly - making the school a place where students want to be.</p>

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<p>Damn, I read your post quickly and thought you said you “saw a cop actually [shoot] a homeless bum.”</p>

<p>Guess you can’t have it all.</p>

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<p>The “One University” thing is not 100% true, but it is pretty close so it makes no sense to talk about Wharton as being something separate from Penn - it is not a freestanding school on the undergrad level, it never was and it never will be. That being said, certainly Penn’s standing in the rankings are improved by having Wharton and I’m not sure that it would be at the same rank without it, but it would still be a very good school.</p>

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<p>While Wharton is definitely the top draw at UPenn, there are other great programs there that absolutely rock! In the communications field, Annenberg is right up there with the best in the country, as is their law school and psychology dept. Not to mention the school of medicine. All these programs and more contribute significantly to Penn’s overall ranking (along with the categories that contribute to the rankings that us students don’t really give 1 cent about). Seriously people, lets do some homework out there.</p>

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<p>^^^ Exactly. I did not know what Wharton was until I started here in CC. I am attending an ivy league univ this fall…btw.</p>

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<p>^^ me too, never heard about wharton until I joined CC</p>

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<p>^^ I didn’t know what Wharton was either until CC.</p>

57

<p>^^^ I STILL don’t know what Wharton is. Never heard of it. Nope.</p>

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<p>At the graduate level: Penn Medicine (the first med school in the USA) and Wharton are both ranked #3; Penn Law is #6 (tied with UChicago); Penn’s Annenberg School of Communication consistently ranks in the top 5; Penn Vet, Dentistry, School of Education, Penn Design and Penn’s Arts and Sciences are all pretty consistently in the top 10. Only the School of Engineering and Applied Science and the School of Social Policy and Practice are not top-ranked.
At the undergraduate level: Penn’s Nursing School and the Wharton School are both ranked #1. The Engineering School I think is ranked #29 (but all Ivy engineering schools with the exception of Cornell are in that range), and Penn’s Bioengineering is #6, Penn’s Nanotechnology is also very strongly regarded by most tech-journals and has been ranked #1 (not US News). As far as the liberal arts go, no concrete rankings are compiled anywhere with the exception of the Gourman Report where Penn’s arts and sciences departments all place in the top 10-15 and several place in the top 5.
Pioneering developments in the field of linguistics were made at Penn by Noam Chomsky and his teacher Zellig Harris (the department has been consistently regarded as the best in the country). Penn has the oldest Psychology department in North America (also top-ranked), the Penn faculty founded the American Psychological Association in 1892, Lightner Whitmer at Penn created the entire field of clinical pscyhology (and the first psychological clinic 1896), Morris Viteles started the field of industrial psychology, Ulrich Neisser wrote ‘Cognitive Psychology’ at Penn, and Twitmyer (who discovered the knee-jerk reflex) discovered the conditioned reflex at Penn (yes, before Pavlov did). Penn’s Psychology department continues to be a leader in the field.
Penn’s English and History departments are also extremely well-regarded and have won several departmental rewards (their faculty also has an extremely high conc.of Guggennheim fellows and Pulitzer prize winners). Penn’s English dept. has won more awards than any other in the College. Anthropology, Architecture, Economics, Regional Studies (Penn has the most comprehensive language center in the country), Neuroscience are all at or near the top of their fields. Archeology and Ancient History also benefit from Penn’s Museum which houses the largest collection of Egyptian artefacts outside of Egypt and the British museum (including the third-largest Sphinx in the world after the ones in Giza and the Louvre), and the professors are at the top of their fields.
There is obviously a lot more, several departments have rich, important histories and impressive records (look up architecture for instance). Penn’s College also has several important collections of rare books and artefacts that draw scholars from around the world.
Penn is an exceptional all-round university and it’s current standing is not simply the result of one department.</p>

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<p>And read up a bit on Penn Medicine and the sort of research it has done, and how many important developments in the medical field it is responsible for…you’d be shocked at just how significant the institution has been in medical history besides being the first med school and first teaching hospital in the US.</p>

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<p>Methinks everyone doth protest too much. Yes, Penn has a great psych department, English dept., etc. , etc. but on the undergrad level Wharton is where the big $s are and this is what a lot of people are drawn to today. Maybe y’all never heard of Wharton but I assure you a lot of people have, a lot of people who would otherwise confuse Penn for Penn State. Maybe that’s a sad commentary on our society or maybe it’s just people being realistic in a competitive world where an undergrad English degree is just not worth a lot in the market place in relation to the almost $200k that a Penn degree will cost you.</p>